2007 CEO update on VA Smalltalk

[Eric Clayberg]

As we head into the last quarter of 2007 I wanted to touch base and give you a quick update on the status and success of Instantiations' VA Smalltalk (VAST). In short, from both technical and business perspectives things are going great and we see a bright future for VAST!

In the approximately 2 years since we took over VisualAge Smalltalk from IBM we've signed up hundreds of companies and have thousands of active users worldwide. Our customers range from Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurial Smalltalk based startups (one recently sold to a larger company for millions!). Many of you have stable, mission critical applications that you plan to continue using for years, others are adding new functionality and taking advantage of the new features we've added to VAST.

VA Smalltalk is a nicely profitable and growing part of the Instantiations' product family. Even with the privileged information provided by IBM as we entered into the VAST partnership we've been very happily surprised by the large number of active Smalltalk customers. Even better, these numbers increase every quarter, demonstrating the value and staying power of VAST.

If you don't follow our software releases closely you may be interested to know that since taking over VAST two years ago Instantiations has released five updates to the product. Our highly skilled Smalltalk team, lead by Smalltalk veterans Eric Clayberg and John O'Keefe, plan to continue this pace into the foreseeable future and will release V8.0 in mid-2008 (adding Seaside web development capability and more). Our goal is to provide you with the capabilities you need to maximize the ongoing value of VAST to your organization.

As you can see from the above, Instantiations is here to provide the innovation, product support, and consulting services you need to protect and evolve your important long-term Smalltalk investments.

Please don't hesitate to contact me via phone or email if you have any questions, concerns, or inputs regarding VA Smalltalk. We look forward to continuing our partnership with you and your organization for many years.

Best regards,

Mike Taylor
President/CEO

Phone: (503) 598-4911
Email: mike_taylor@instantiations.com
Web: http://www.instantiations.com

[louis_andriese]

Mike (and the VAST staff),

Thanks for the update.

Things are moving fast in the Seaside-arena. The more or less recent initiatives by both Gemstone and Cincom in this field have yielded a lot of positive reactions.
At ESUG this year there was some preliminary talk on a Seaside port to VAST and an almost-ready proof of concept.

I understand that, given the nature of VA Smalltalk, it will take you some time to release a definitive 8.0-version of VAST with Seaside all shining and perfect. And I understand that given the complexity of the matter, you can at this stage be no more precise about the final release-date than mid-2008.

It would however give me some peace-of-mind to get a general feeling about the way Seaside-development is progressing at Instantiations.
Would it be possible to provide some more frequent updates (and insights) on the porting process?

And, taking things a bit further, you are the proud owner of a very qualified customer base, consisting of highly skilled Smalltalk enthusiasts. Perhaps it would even be possible to provide them with some community previews?

I know it would make my life as a manager easier to get a general feeling about the progression you are making, and I would be happy to invest some time in evaluating a preview of the coming release, even in its early development stage.

Kind regards,

[Eric Clayberg]

We have some of our best people working on the Seaside port, but it is a large system, and it relies on a lot of non-standard Smalltalk code. We have all of the Seaside code loaded into VAST, but key pieces of it are not running yet.

Seaside is also not the only thing we are working on, so the amount of time we spend working on it is inversely proportional to the time we spend on customer support (customer support generally takes first priority).

We defnitely plan to provide access to public VAST 8.0 betas once we have them available. At the moment, Seaside is more of an all-or-nothing piece, and it would do you no good to look at it before we get it running.

[rjs]

It woud be nice to get a 2008 update...